i
she hoped that the subject would be forgotten. it was not forgotten. that was clear to her, although silas made no direct allusion; but by his manner he established the existence of a secret between them, and because she dared not say to him, “there is no secret,” the secret remained, growing insidiously. she was nervous and uneasy in his presence. silas was kinder than ever she had known him, kinder and gentler, also he appeared to be more contented, but she had a terrified suspicion that he was contented only because his mind was occupied, and it seemed horrible to her that she should be the centre of that occupation. she had suddenly become involved in an affair whose existence, she protested to herself, had its being solely as the outcome of silas’s imagination. she tried to shake it off and to laugh it away, but he held her to it. she had the helpless sensation of being on the end of a rope that 159he was slowly hauling in, maintaining his purchase over every miserly inch as he gained it.
hambley, soft-footed, insinuating, and urbane, added by his parasitic presence to the uneasiness of the house. the yellow faced, thin little man, with his black hair and his long front teeth like a rodent’s, never had an opinion of his own, but echoed silas, or cackled with the laughter of approval. he alternately tried to provoke and to propitiate nan and morgan, gibed at them when they were civil to him, and fawned on them when they were curt. nan shuddered when she wondered how many of silas’s darker thoughts were shared out to his keeping.
was there a conspiracy against her? to her mind, full of alarm, this seemed not impossible. calthorpe even,—her prop, her kind, comfortable friend,—calthorpe mentioned casually, “i may have to steal gregory from you, my dear; i must have a man with me when i go to birmingham to look over some new plants, and i fancy that your gregory would relish the job, and be very useful to me.” she had clasped his arm. “oh no, don’t take gregory away, mr. calthorpe.” “what!” he said in surprise, “are you so fond of him?” she did not answer. she was not fond of gregory; he was an owner and an institution, 160but the question of fondness played no part. hitherto, she had not thought of disliking him; that was all. he and silas (until she knew silas was a murderer) had appeared very much the same in her mind, the only difference being that whereas gregory had rights over her passive and uninquiring person silas had none.
“well, am i not to take him?” asked calthorpe.
“yes, take him,” she replied. why had she hesitated? by all these doubts and hesitations she was playing silas’s game; he had gained another inch of the rope. “when are you going?”
“it’s all quite uncertain; i may not be going at all. but if i go, it will be some time next month, and i shall ask for gregory. i am discovering that he has the real knack for any kind of engine; he’s sulky about it and contemptuous, but i urge him, and he unfolds. he showed me some of his plans—but you’re in the clouds?”
ii
silas was with lady malleson, more than usually morose. she lay upon the sofa, while he prowled up and down the room.
“dene, you scarcely speak to me to-day?”
161(“she cringes,” he thought with pride.)
“my sister-in-law’s in love,” he replied tersely.
“with whom has she fallen in love?” asked lady malleson, thinking how strange it was that she should be thus intimately conversant with a group of work-people down in the village.
“with morgan,—the young zany.”
“why, you always seemed so fond of him! your one human frailty,” she bantered. but he rounded on her with unwarrantable sharpness. “i think your ladyship is mistaken: i never remember saying i was fond of morgan. they’re neither of them any more alive than a turtle-dove sunning itself in a wicker cage.”
“you strange creature—have you no natural affections?” she said, with indolent curiosity. “none for that young man, who really devotes himself to you? none for your little harmless sister-in-law?”
“i’m nothing to them—only a blind man to whom they’re kind out of their charity.”
“i don’t believe, silas, that you are so bleak as you make out.”
“my own solitude, my lady, is my own choosing.”
“why shouldn’t you accept what comfort those two young things could give you?”
162“it’s weak,” he burst out, “why not stand alone? why depend on another? why shouldn’t the strength of one suffice? why all this need to double it? love’s wholly a question of weakness; the weaker you are, the more desperately you love. a prop.... love’s the first tie for an independent man to rid himself of. it’s a weakness that grows too easily out of all proportion. i want my mind for other things, not for anything so trite. so well charted. so ... so recurrent.”
“another theory, silas? be careful,” she lazily teased him; “what we most abuse, you know, is often what we most fear.”
“i shall break them,” he growled.
“what! your sister-in-law? that frail-looking little thing?”
“she, and ... her lover.”
“silas, you scare me sometimes, you speak so savagely.”
“scare you, my lady? even you?”
“why ‘even me’?”
“you’ve explored me,” he said grudgingly; “you know me so well.”
“do i? everything about you?”
“not quite,” he said, in a tone of profound gloom.
163“do you know yourself, i wonder?”
“to the depths,” he replied.
“do you enjoy having such complete self-knowledge?”
“it’s lonely,” he said, his face drawn.
“lonely, but you have me now to talk to.”
“oh, your ladyship is very kind and gracious,” he said, with the deferential manner he sometimes abruptly assumed, and through which she always uncomfortably suspected the sarcasm; “i am very grateful to your ladyship. but your ladyship....” and thus far he preserved his deference, but abandoned it now to exclaim as though tormented, “you’re a whetstone to my disquiet; you taunt me, you keep all peace from me.”
“i never knew you wanted peace.”
he was tired and dispirited that day, and had been dwelling upon his blindness; he craved for peace, for some one to give him peace!—and she knew it. but she must whip and provoke him back to the strain of his old attitude. she did not know what urged her to say as she did, in her most sneering tone, “i never knew you wanted peace.”
“nor i do,” he snarled; “i wouldn’t have it as a gift.”
164
iii
so they wrangled always; indispensable she might be to him, but peace was certainly not what she brought him. and although they maintained the disguise afforded by her tone of slight condescension, and by his of conventional respect, underneath this disguise fomented the perpetual and manifold contest, of class against class, of the rough against the fastidious, of the man against the woman. she had very little real fear that its full strength would ever break over her,—little real fear, only enough to provide the spice she exacted. she trusted to her appraisement of him: too proud to risk a rebuff; too fiercely recalcitrant under the thongs of affection. under their menace he snorted and reared, while she laughed indolently, and incited him to further indignations. yet she held him, she held him! and though she knew full well that she fretted and exasperated him, she held him still; seeing his struggles, but toying with him, pretending to let him go, pulling him back, distracting and confusing his spirit that was always beating round in the search for escape; and all the while she heard from various quarters the pleasant flattery of her guilt extolled under the name of charity.
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iv
“you’ll be happy soon: you’ll have the spring,” silas said to nan. he did not speak with the customary note of derision in his voice,—this was the newer silas,—but she thought she detected it very painstakingly concealed.
she went away from him, and her going was after the manner of a flight. had she followed her impulse, she would have gone running, with her head bent down between her protecting hands. it seemed that she could keep nothing from silas; he laid his grasp without mercy upon her shyest secrets. she had tried to keep her joy in the coming spring a secret; although reserve was hard of accomplishment to her, she had achieved it, hiding her delight away in her heart, or so she believed, not knowing that her laughter had rung more clearly, or that she had been singing so constantly over her work in the two cottages. she was conscious of no impatience and no desires. she would not, by a wish, have made herself a month older. she was happy now, she told herself, because the country would presently become a refuge from the factory, instead of its dismal and consonant setting, wide and level as the sea itself, in its centre the sinister hump of the 166abbey and the factory. by walking a little way in the opposite direction, and turning her back upon the village, she would dismiss the factory and look across the liberated country, as it was impossible to do in these days when the floods accompanied the factory for miles around as a reflection of its spirit. she told herself that she wanted nothing more. she knew that she could be happy,—perhaps not indefinitely, but she did not look far ahead, the present was too buoyant and suspended,—happy for the moment if silas would but leave her alone.
v
for a few days he kept up his new smooth-spoken tone; it was “little nan” this, and “little nan” that, and whenever he could get hold of her hand he stroked and patted it, and joined his fingers round her wrist, saying that it was fragile. “you’re very slight, nan,” he said, feeling her arm and shoulder, and once he laid one hand against her chest and the other against her back, and said that there was no thickness in her body. she withdrew herself, shuddering, from his touch. “i’m blind, you know,” he whined, and then laughed, “bless you, blind or not blind, i know any of you in the room before you’ve 167spoken; there’s very little silas doesn’t know. i know all about you, nan, and i’m a good friend to you, too.” “but silas ...” she began desperately. “hush!” he said, putting his fingers to her lips and looking mysterious, “no need to say anything; we understand one another.” just then linnet morgan came in, throwing aside his cap, and nan clasped her hands in terror lest silas should continue. “linnet?” said silas instantly, “you’re back early to-day.”
linnet had work which could as easily be done at home. he began at once getting books and papers out of his cupboard, and disposing them on the table. he and nan observed one another stealthily and quickly; he saw that she wore her dark red shirt and black skirt, and that on his entrance she had become silent as though confused, but meanwhile he talked to silas and made him laugh, and ran his fingers backwards through his hair. nan noticed that his crisp hair was quite golden at the roots, and that a fine white line followed the beginning of its growth. he was very fair-skinned, and the back of his neck where it disappeared into his collar was covered with a fine golden down. he was always busy; when he was not working he was 168talking and laughing; nan supposed that he had never in his life had time to think about himself.
“there’s something i’ve always wanted to know,” began silas, resting his arms upon the table as though he were watching nan and linnet, “what were you two doing here the night martin came? while i was at the abbey?”
“the night the donkey was maimed?” asked morgan.
“why, fancy you remembering that!” said silas negligently.
“i was clearing up, and we talked for a bit,” nan put in.
“there was nothing to clear up; it was sunday evening and you’d been singing and playing your zither. you talked mostly,—now, didn’t you?”
“why not?” asked morgan. he was very rarely sharp in speech, but he saw nan’s discomfort.
“why not, indeed? you and nan are much of an age,” silas replied. they considered him wonderingly; was he well-intentioned or infinitely malign? as they considered him he got up and went towards the stairs. “back in a moment,” he said. they heard his tread upon the steps, then moving overhead. they looked at one another.
169“why did you say that about the donkey?” nan asked.
“you think, like me, that silas did it,” he answered, as a statement. “don’t look so frightened,” he went on, his eyes softening into his ready smile; “i assure you, you need never be frightened of silas. there’s no muscle in his violence. nothing will ever come of it—beyond maiming donkeys. oh yes, it’s horrible, i know, because it’s so futile. no, don’t shake your head—your pretty head,” he added inaudibly. an impulse came over him to cry “you tiny thing! you slip of fragility!” but he repressed it.
she uttered the most treacherous remark she had ever breathed about silas, something which fringed the frightful truth, “i know better,” then terrified of her indiscretion, added, “oh no, i mean nothing.”
“you are afraid of him, aren’t you?” he said, coming round the table closer to her, his attitude very sympathetic and protective, and differing by a shade from calthorpe’s attitude. “you must not be that. one can only be sorry for silas, who has grown warped and crooked, and who talks because there is nothing else he can do. whenever i think of silas, i feel so lucky in mind and body.”
170she glanced at him gratefully. he had had the tact not to urge an explanation of her injudicious remark, and she knew that she could always depend upon this gentle tact; moreover, he had rescued her soul from the terror she so dreaded, and had by his words set silas in a sane and pitiful light. it suited her temperament to have silas drawn down from the uncomfortable heights where he seemed to dwell in perpetual strife with elements. it was no longer silas who brooded over them, but they who endured and even loved silas with widened charity. she was very grateful to linnet for this. what he had done once he could do again; he could soothe her terrors. she had not yet thought of him in so human, companionable a way.
he continued the line that he had taken up, giving her time to command herself fully, making no demands upon her and pretending that nothing had been amiss. he swung himself on to the table, and talked easily,—
“i feel so lucky and thankful for having whole limbs and a sane mind. i don’t covet genius, but i do covet sanity; in fact, i’m not sure that the broadest genius isn’t the supreme sanity. balance and justice! i think those two things are magnificent 171and grand,” (but he himself, she knew, would in practice always be merciful rather than just).
“i wish i had your book-learning,” she said; “you ought to stick to books.”
“oh no,” he replied, “i like chemistry better, and those things. science.... if i hadn’t to earn my living i shouldn’t be working on scents in this factory. no! i’d be in a country cottage with a laboratory.”
“you do your best as it is,” she said, touching his stack of scientific books.
“i had a bit of training at edinburgh university,” he said, in wistful reminiscence, “but one ought to dedicate years....”
“who was your father?” she asked after much deliberation whether she might venture the question. she knew morgan only as an isolated person, who had arrived one day into the world of the factory, and had never mentioned home or relations. she knew only that he was scotch; he had a very slight scotch accent.
“he was an inverness crofter,” he replied vaguely, “i used to keep the sheep on the hills in mists and snows, and properly i hated it. the days 172were short, and i thought it was always winter. i used to sit shivering on the brae-side, huddled in a plaid for shelter under a boulder, trying to read while i kept one eye on the sheep. the pages of my book used to get damp and limp, and the print got blurred when i tried to dry the page with the corner of my jacket. then somebody found out that i wasn’t getting any education, and reported it, so i was sent back to school, and was happy again. and you—you haven’t lived here always, have you?”
“since i was ten,” she replied, sighing, “we used to live in the south before that ... i liked that,” she said, “it was a pretty place, midhurst, near arundel—perhaps you know it?” she thought innocently, and rather in the fashion of a child, that every one must know what she knew.
“i wish i did, but i don’t.”
“oh, it’s under the downs. do you remember the day we walked with silas to thorpe’s howland? that put me in mind of midhurst; there were woods round about midhurst.”
“you enjoyed yourself that day, didn’t you?”
he expected a little burst of rhapsody from her, but she only said quietly, “yes, i did,” and he was aware of disappointment, and at the same time of 173the little stinging charm of her occasional unexpectedness.
“we both come from sheep country, then,” he said, but the images evoked in their minds were different: his of rough hills with their summits lost in mist, and lochs lying amongst the windings at their base; of dirty huddled flocks swept by wind and sleet; while hers were of cropped downland under a blue and white open sky, with the shadows of the clouds bowling across the downs and over the clumps of trees and little church-steeples in the valleys. he realised the disparity, saying “when i say that, we see different pictures,” and he smiled, but in his heart he longed for their childhood to have run side by side either in the sussex or the highland village. “have you ever been back there?” he asked.
“oh no; it’s a long way from lincolnshire. i was always at the factory after i left school, and then when i was eighteen mother died and i married.”
“only eighteen?”
“a week after my birthday.”
“how young!” he said, with such rich and wondering compassion that she looked suddenly as it were into the depths of a cool inexhaustible well, always at hand for the quenching of her thirst. he 174was sitting on the table near her, while their conversation flowed on in its effortless interest, so that time and his books were forgotten. he seemed quite absorbed in what they were saying, looking down at her with intent consideration. they had attained an intimacy in which they could talk untroubled; she found it very precious.
“now, linnet!” said silas’s bantering voice, “making love to my sister-in-law?”
vi
silas became unwontedly withdrawn into himself, neither nan nor morgan knew what to make of him. at times he avoided them, at other times silently sought their company. gregory, to whom nan turned, after one glance at his brother, replied, “let him alone,” and she followed the brief formula as being the best advice, finding that silas only snarled at her whenever she spoke to him. she was relieved rather than dismayed; silas surly was preferable to silas honeyed.
he roamed alone, spending hours in the abbey after dusk; or ordered up hambley, and under the little man’s guidance made his way to the secluded summer-house at malleson place. lady malleson 175was also at a loss to understand his altered manner; towards her he relaxed his taciturnity, and his speech was more than ever wild and varied, but although he ranged erratically she had the impression that his mind rarely departed from one central subject, and she had also the shrewd idea that that subject was his little sister-in-law, whom she had once seen, and whom she vaguely thought a pretty, delicate, rather appealing girl, unimportant until she had become the preoccupation of silas’s thoughts.
so long as she had silas with her, however, she cared very little what he talked about. the utmost that she deplored, sometimes, was his restlessness. it made her wonder whether she really held him. she wondered, indeed, sometimes whether her hold on him was too light to satisfy her vanity, or too secure—all too secure!—for the preservation of her safety and her convenience. she liked danger well enough, but there was a point where danger might become too dangerous.
“wild man,—ishmael,” she said to him.
but he went on regardless with what he had been saying.
“there’s but one use for the body,” he exclaimed, “health. not mortification—that’s morbid. but 176health, lean and hard. sinews like whips.” he bared a magnificent forearm. “the only instance where i practise what i preach,” he added bitterly, causing the muscles to rise at will.
“then you should respect your brother gregory,” she said, languidly content.
“you have seen him lately, my lady?”
“yesterday, in the village.”
“the neatest of minds, in the body of a blacksmith,” said silas.
“neat?”
“why, yes—so long as he doesn’t break out. then he lays all around him, smashes everything he can see, without comment—that makes it quite uncanny, i assure you—and in a trice returns to his quiet and his neatness as though nothing out of the way had happened. he’s very inaccessible, my brother gregory. no warnings. no explanations. no remorse. nothing apparently, but action.”
“you respect that,” she said, looking at his fine bony face, and his thick rough hair.
“think, if a man’s killed,” he brooded, “killed by violent means, what an outrage on the body. blood spilt, that ran secretly and private in his veins. 177bones, no one had ever seen. entrails. what a bursting!”
she pictured his mind as a landscape ravaged by war, here a wreckage of stone and twisted iron, there a grave, here the stark calvary of a stricken tree, there the bright blare of poppies striving for life amongst the rushes and rank weeds.
“you waste yourself,” she said; “you should be a martyr,—or a poet.”
she liked to stir him, by such calculated remarks.
“a second-rate poet? not i,” he sneered instantly; then, as the flattery stole over him, “more likely a martyr, of the two,” he said, responding.
“you waste yourself,” she repeated, drawing meanwhile slowly through her fingers the long silk fringe of a shawl that lay thrown across her sofa, “you waste yourself, out of contempt. you eagle with broken wings!”—she knew with what gluttony he accepted such metaphors, and amused herself when he wasn’t with her by thinking out new ones that she might serve up to him,—“you repudiate comfort, don’t you, in your dream of grandeur. will you end, i wonder, by getting neither?” “no one speaks to me like your ladyship,” he muttered reluctantly. she laughed. she enjoyed pretending 178to an ideal of him that, his pride well fired, he would strain himself to live up to; an ideal, moreover, that coincided so adroitly with his own ideal of himself. “i never knew a man so vigorously reject the second-best. it was a pity,” she continued, smoothing out and patting down the fringe of the shawl, “that you never came across a woman to suit you.” she raised her eyes to watch him as she talked, and modulated her phrases according to the expression she found on his face, nor did she trouble to conceal the busy mischief in her own; there were advantages, certainly, in his blindness. “how would you have behaved, i wonder?” she went on; “you would have made a stormy lover, i fancy, once your resistance had been thrown to the winds. stormy and exacting. poor woman! yet i dare say she wouldn’t have minded. women are like that, you know. and for you,—no more loneliness, no more unsatisfied longings, no more misanthropy. i believe you’d have grown into a different man. you would probably have achieved a good deal.... but it would have taken a clever woman, a very clever woman, to steer you without your knowing that you were being steered.”
“women in my walk of life don’t have time for 179cleverness, my lady,” he said acrimoniously, giving a literal answer to her words because he must ignore the meaning which he read into them, and which, as he well knew, she had intended him to read. her ingenuity was tireless over insinuations that put him on the rack. clever, she had said; she was clever enough! why hadn’t they, he wondered, appointed women to sit upon the tribunals of the inquisition? “if you had been born into my class, or i into yours ...” he burst out.
“i don’t admit impertinence, you know, dene,” she said in a voice of ice, “and anyway i am afraid i cannot give you any more time at present.”
vii
thus, always. he hated his bondage, he despised while he coveted the woman, he hated her for holding him bound, but nothing, nothing was comparable to his hatred and disgust of himself in his inability to get free. often he raved audibly, shaking his fists; and those who saw him stopped to listen to his mutterings, and thought what an alarming sight silas dene presented, with his wild blind eyes and furrowed mouth that mumbled and let drop the tiny river of saliva. he was often to be 180seen thus in the abbey, of an evening, prowling in the aisles; where occasionally on a sunday he would be perceived by the rare visitor attracted to abbot’s etchery, that strange island of factory and norman abbey emerging amidst the floods, sufficiently singular to be worth the journey out from lincoln; and those who saw him there went away saying that not the least arresting sight in the desolate encampment was the blind man who in savagery and loneliness haunted the precincts of the abbey, and whose incoherent ravings could be readily changed by a little encouragement into a tirade of such vehemence, such angry bitterness, such bewildering aggression. they went away wondering what ailed him, to have made of him so baffling and solitary a figure.
viii
rumour, at the same time, began to trot like a jackal round the figure of silas. there was the incident, never very clear to the village, of the fire. loyalty of course silenced nan and morgan; and hambley, to a very large extent silenced through fear, dared do no more than drop hints that silas could scarcely trace back to him. nevertheless, a 181taste of the story got about, a taste that the village relished and rolled over on its tongue, both in the workshops and the public bar,—for gossip that penetrated the fiercely secluded house of the denes, and brought to light even the tip of one of their buried secrets, had a legendary smack denied to topics more vulgar and more frequently accessible.
also, lady malleson’s name was murmured, behind the shelter of a raised hand.
nan was aware of the curious looks, thrown at her because she had been with silas during the fire; and morgan, aware of similar looks, met them with a contemptuous impatience; but silas for some days knew of nothing amiss. only when he stood up to speak at the debating-club, down in the concert-room, he heard a murmur pass through his audience, a murmur of resentment and disapproval. it was as though the accumulated resentment of the men, repressed hitherto out of a lack of understanding, a certain awe, and even a grudging admiration, had now broken its bonds under a definite provocation that had submerged their submission by arousing their disgust. it was a low murmur, compounded of irritation, criticism, and of mutiny under a tyranny they no longer respected and were therefore no 182longer prepared to admit. silas heard it, and with his fist already lifted for his peroration, stopped himself dead.
he faced them, standing alone under the dark frown of many sulky and rebellious looks.
“some one spoke?” he demanded.
he was accustomed to exact silence when he took up the debate.
he had very little time to decide his course of action; he knew that they were against him; knew, obscurely, why; and dared not press home the question.
morgan was not present, or he might have tided over the matter, out of pity for silas, who in his defiance looked so extraordinarily gaunt and solitary, and so undefeatably proud.
morgan, however, was busy elsewhere, so that silas faced only a lowering throng, that sat obstinate, chins thrust forward into palms and murmured still, with deliberate intent to affront, but without the courage to bring clear accusation.
“this isn’t the treatment i’m accustomed to receive here,” silas bayed at them finally, “and until i’m invited i’ll no longer trouble you. invited i said, and invited i meant. if i’m sought up at my 183own house perhaps i’ll reconsider it, and come back to you. for the present, good-night to you all.”
one, more kind-hearted than the rest, and perhaps ashamed, rose clumsily to intercept him as he went towards the door.
“i’ll help you, dene.”
silas thrust him aside, and strode away alone.
ix
when this story had come to the ears of nan and morgan, they whispered “the fire!” and crept away from one another sooner than disturb a subject of which they could not bear to speak.
the fire had taken place at night, and had not been in itself of any importance. “you see nothing but a few tarred sheds burning,” silas had cried, in a frenzy of desperation to morgan, “and folk will come to me to-morrow to say you acted gallantly, or what not. why shouldn’t you, seeing only wood and flames? you don’t hear it coming after you with great light strides and flaming fingers....”
“silas, you’re afraid,” morgan had said gravely.
silas had checked himself at that; he had quavered, and made an effort to recover. the accusation 184had fallen like a plummet into the uncontrolled waters of his mind. he had quavered, and almost gibbered at morgan; so greatly fallen beneath his normal standard of pride and independence that he had been shocking to hear and see. he had tried to defend himself, “not afraid, only helpless, helpless....”
nan and morgan had stood, hearing him beseech them not to leave him. nan knew then that silas was betrayed by fear into revealing something he usually kept very, very carefully concealed; that was why the exposure was so shocking and so degrading; and morgan seeing it with her eyes stood beside her, both equally hurt, and equally craving to rescue silas. but he, in his mingled panic and resentment, had had nothing but insults for them, and, nearly screaming, told morgan to clear out.
“shall i stay with you?” nan had asked.
he had hesitated; he wanted to fling her out, he tried to make himself say, “no, go!” but his extreme terror was stronger than this flicker of his other, antagonistic. he said, “yes, you can stay,” a heat of hatred for her passing over him as he said it.
185
x
they had sat in silence after morgan had gone, because silas had forbidden her to speak. she was glad of the hush, for she felt that she had passed through a great empty din and that the brass vacancy of cymbals was still clanging in her ears. the scene had wounded her, and had roused emotions that bewildered her. why should she resent (to the extent of stretching out deterrent hands, as she had done,) the betrayal of silas by himself? somewhere, though she would neither have probed nor acknowledged, she had believed that underneath her fear and pity lay hatred of silas; she had even tried to extend her pity into a reassuring mental scorn. yet to him, who never spared others, she had had the impulse to cry, “spare yourself.” she had suffered from seeing him untrue to his own tradition.
they sat in silence, silas tearing at the seat of a rush-bottomed chair, nan watching the unequal glow in the sky outside the windows. she found herself trembling from time to time. not with fear of the fire, but with disgust and regret of that noisy scene. she wished that something would happen to restore him to his ancient formidable credit, something to remove that disquieting sense of his fraudulence. 186she turned away from him, but next moment was glancing at him again; he was destroying the seat of the chair, shred by shred, his fine hands pulling at the rushes with a peevish haste and his head bent obstinately away from observation. every time a siren hooted he hunched himself more closely together, as though the compression of his limbs would afford him some protection.
“i think the glare is dying down, silas,” she said gently.
he hunched himself fretfully away.
he was thinking, “they are full of forbearance and long-suffering. am i to be taught gratitude? perhaps through disaster? they would let god himself look into every corner of their minds. little children!” for the moment, under the effect of his fear, he did not brand them as lacking in savour. their limpidity seemed to him as desirable as the absence of danger. if danger might but be removed he would abandon as the price his own arrogant passions. he was humbled now to another standard of life. weary of battle and opposition, peace appeared to him sweet and seemly, now that he had been granted tumult,—a tumult not of his own making, and entirely out of the control of his stage-managing. 187he thought again, “they have never a quick word against me. nan gave me a stick, and i broke it and said i wanted no stick, because i knew she expected me to show pleasure. i am sure that after i broke it she had tears in her eyes. but why should she try to coax me with presents? or i allow myself to be coaxed?” he shuddered at the long scream of a siren, and reflected that they had probably kept the extent of the fire from him, knowing that he could not verify. for an instant he caught hold of the idea that the fire might get across the village to the abbey, and destroy that; and a little flash of old wicked glee passed across him. but it died away. he imagined the fire travelling down his own street, men and women flying before it, and he himself forgotten, engulfed,—perhaps even purposely left to perish. at this point he spoke, “are you there, nan?” she was there. “i never meant you any harm, nan,” he said surprisingly. warm-hearted, she was at his side as the words left his lips. “no, silas, i know that....” “that’ll do,” he said pushing her away.
but he had now started upon another train of thought, which he adopted and amplified with his usual vehemence. “god preserve me, and i will live 188to befriend nan and linnet.” obscurely he had the instinct of propitiation, offering his intention as a bribe to a very angry god; and partially in his chastened mood,—albeit but the vile chastening of terror,—he yielded to the stirrings of his own repressed sentimentalism. simplicity, limpidity, were perhaps not the poor and bloodless attributes he had thought. their case might be turned convincingly by a skilful advocate. he, silas, had the mettle of strife within him; those other two had not: (the fire! the fire! in the meanderings of his arguments he had almost forgotten the fire. in the rush of recollection he knotted his fingers together till they cracked. he was horribly afraid.) those two did not fight and wrestle with chimeras, muscles knotted and sweat pouring, as silas did. their minds were not ridden by demons. they did not sight everywhere a portent, a dark enemy or a fiercely fair ally. he had scorned them as easy, milky, satisfied,—he knew well the run of the familiar epithets. he had tried to scorn them; he had forsworn their kindness. he had crushed his love for them, and his longing to allow the warm tide of that love to flow in solace over him. he had been proud, and had driven his craft ever to sea, courting the gales and riot, rather 189than accept the broad comfort of the haven. proud! proud! how superbly proud! how proportionately base the physical fear that could humble such a spirit of arrogance in man!
xi
a cry from nan brought him to his feet, chattering. “what it it? what is it?” in a renewed access of fear. “oh, silas!” she exclaimed, coming close to him, “there’s hambley looking in through the window; tell him to go away, oh, please tell him to go away! he does what you tell him always.”
hambley was indeed pressing his face against the window, and the shape of his head was dark against the red sky. he was so small that he was only just able to reach the window by climbing to the outside sill with the tips of his fingers, and the end of his nose was flattened white upon the pane. nan could see the grin on his evil little face. silas strode to the door, flung it open, and summoned the little man. at the end of the street the night was torn by flames.
as soon as hambley was inside he seized the little man by his collar. “now what were you doing, peeping into my house when you thought you 190wouldn’t be found out? you little skunk, i’ve always called you, and so you are. you frightened nan, you little skunk. you meant to spy upon me. well, you’ll see what you get!” holding him easily with one hand, sometimes swinging him clean off his feet, so that he twirled and dangled in mid-air, silas thrashed him with his fist, and hambley shrieked and appealed to nan, and tried, but quite vainly, to kick silas. nan got into a corner, out of the way of the blows. when he had finished, silas carried him over to the door and threw him regardlessly out into the street.
xii
morgan came back at midnight, and said that the fire was over, not having spread beyond the sheds. he was rubbing his blackened hands on a piece of waste. his eyes fell upon the litter of shredded rushes scattered in witness on the floor near silas. nan drooped, pale and tired. he began to tell her about the fire, trying to brighten her and to make her feel that she was no longer a prisoner alone with silas. he was purposely taking no notice of silas, but presently looked up to see the blind man standing above them.
191he appeared to be immensely tall and haggard, and upon his face was a look of suffering, which by the accentuation of furrow and wrinkle gave the suggestion that he was unkempt. his limbs and torso were hugely, grotesquely reproduced in shadow upon the walls and ceiling behind him. inscrutable to them, he loomed over nan and linnet. at last he spoke.
“you’re glad to have him back, nan. you’re glad to come back to her, linnet.”
their eyes met in tremulous surprise; was silas to serve as their interpreter?
“you little, dainty people! oh, yes. i know. gentle in your dealings. amiable. indulgent. you don’t criticise—criticism’s uncharitable—might hurt somebody’s feelings. let things remain as they are; don’t disturb. moderation! that’s your creed. make terms. compromise!” he dropped ejaculations, and swung into his most rhetorical vein, in which he seemed really possessed by a spirit that released the unfaltering words. “o pliant ones of the earth! blessed are the meek, and flowers shall revive at your passage. wander into the woods; call to the roe-deer to eat from your hand. look with envy at the pairing foxes, the nesting birds; 192no creature so wild that it may escape the yearly call of home. if the fox and the vixen together can burrow their earth for shelter and the whelping of their litter, cannot you two together build a hut of boughs and branches in a clearing beside the stream? listen: i covet no love, i am debarred; and love when it touches men like me is no virtue, only an indulgence of self and a lapse from strength.” he laughed. “who would be weak? or bestial? but in you, love shall attain its highest purpose of usefulness and steadfastness. to be steadfast in love is reserved to man; it is the conscious will of love, the sustained reason. without it, as well be a dog, and couple in the street. are you fit? you are young and your minds are counterparts; you have no business with me or with gregory. leave me to gregory, and gregory to me; the dumb shall lead the blind, and the blind shall speak for the dumb. but you, go out, where no strife assails, and concern yourselves with labour. you are the builders, and we are the destroyers; we are the cursed, and you are the blessed. you and your like must build your security upon the ruins of us and our like; it’s the natural law. i might have been another man, but god saw fit to twist me; he 193wrenched my spirit and upon each of my eyes in turn he laid a finger.”
they sat absolutely speechless, confused and confounded that he should thus trumpet out the secret they had hitherto guarded from one another. they had wondered and suffered and trembled much, but of all outcomes this was an outcome they had certainly never foreseen. it broke over them like a natural catastrophe; silas was making it into something beyond the diapason of their souls.
“build!” he said passionately, earnestly, “build with your sanity and your health. leave query and destruction to the tormented spirits; there will always be enough of those; and if you did but know,—oh, world!” he said, clasping his hands, “if you did but know, you would pity the precursor, solitary and bold. then comes the army of the workers, with honest tools, and their flowing quietness.—why should you struggle, you two, beside gregory and me? you should be side by side, perfectly matched, amongst children who should resemble you. tell me,” he said, bending down to them, “you love?”
when he reduced it to those naked terms, they were ashamed into honesty, both towards him and towards each other; they assented, as though he 194were a priest reading over them a terrible and simple marriage-service.
“then you shall have the courage to love. you shall go unmolested. you were intended to fulfil, not to renounce. who pretends to one law for all? not i; i wouldn’t dare utter such a heresy of intolerance. not in my sane moments. who would take a field-bird up into the mountains? his place is simpler; sweeter....”
he suddenly put his hands over his face, and his voice faltered, as though he were spent and had nothing more to say.
“go away now,” he said fretfully, “i’m tired out.”
